A Nightmare on Elm Street

This week Chris and Lizzie dive into Wes Craven's nightmares, bask in Johnny Depp's nauseatingly green performance, and marvel at Freddy Krueger's culinary inspired makeup. Plus, how Bob Shaye's leap of faith on Elm Street gave us Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings", Wes Craven's failed attempts to make a nice movie, and the unexpected benefits of setting yourself on fire, literally and otherwise. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

  12 celebrities, one Don, and cold, hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. In this unique new reality competition show hosted by the iconic Parker Posey, 12 celebrity contestants are about to become members of a powerful family. For two weeks in a lavish Italian villa, they'll shake down and hustle to win a share of up to $250,000. And every good mob needs a Don. Whoever they choose to lead them will have absolute power deciding who stays and who gets taken out, who makes money, and who walks away with nothing. In a game of power where loyalty and trust are the currency,

• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

  will the most powerful reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners. Before we get into our regularly scheduled programming, we wanted to extend our deep gratitude to anybody who made it out to our very first live show this last week. Thank you also to anybody who watched the livestream via Patreon. It was truly a blast seeing so many of you on there and in person, and we are excited to make this a more regular occurrence. If you missed the first live show but still want to see it, fret not. We are going to be releasing the full cut of the live show this coming Friday, October 17th, on our Patreon. If you're interested in watching, go to www.patreon.com and sign up for the $5 tier or above, and this Friday, 10/17,

• 2:18Chris Winterbauer?

  you will get access to the full cut of our first live show. All right. That's enough housekeeping. Without further ado, let's dive into A Nightmare on Elm Street.

• 2:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone the stuff of nightmares, sort of arguably not scary at all, but very fun. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do we, what does Freddie have for us today?

• 3:18Lizzie Bassett?

  The most annoying sound effect.

• 3:20Chris Winterbauer?

  That's just nails on the chalkboard came from one of the actors, as we will learn. We are discussing the 1984 slasher classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that violates one of the last places we believed to be safe, our dreams or our nightmares, which was a very inventive conceit and I would argue a quantum leap forward for the genre. But Lizzie, before we get into all of that, I have to ask, had you seen A Nightmare on Elm Street before and what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:56Lizzie Bassett?

  So this is one where I'm very familiar with all of the imagery, very familiar with Johnny Depp being eaten by the bed. You know, I'd seen all of these scenes and pieces I had never.

• 4:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Spoilers.

• 4:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, spoilers for a.

• 4:07Chris Winterbauer?

  If it came out more than 30 years ago, then it's fine.

• 4:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. But I had not seen the whole thing in toto. And you know what? Really enjoyed it. It's, it is not. At least by today's standards, it's not at all scary. It is very fun and the practical effects are just great. And I can't wait to hear how they did a lot of this stuff. I was really, really impressed, particularly by the first sort of time we see one of the nightmare attacks happening to Tina, 45-year-old high school student Tina, when she's sort of flipping around and what they did with, you know, I'm imagining reversing some of the sets. It's very, very cool. It's very inventive. It looks great.

• 4:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, the blood looks, the blood looks like house paint, but it does overall look really good. I have one other hot take from this. Johnny Depp is not who I would have expected to be a breakout star out of this.

• 5:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yeah, he, we will get into his involvement and his relative experience as an actor.

• 5:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it none? Because that's what it looks like.

• 5:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, we'll get there. Who would you have picked as the breakout star of this film? Just in terms of who, whose performance did you feel was strongest?

• 5:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I think Nancy's really pretty good. I think the, the lead Nancy is-

• 5:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Heather Langenkamp.

• 5:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I think she's pretty great. And then, not gonna lie, I'm sort of surprised that Rod didn't have a stronger turn after this.

• 5:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think for my money, 24-year-old Tina Amanda Wiss, very rude.

• 5:51Lizzie Bassett?

  50-year-old high schooler.

• 5:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I think she is the strongest performance. She's also in the shortest amount of, you know, she has the least screen time of all the actors, so it's condensed. But before we get there, I, I had seen this film growing up. You and I are more children of the Scream iteration of meta slashers. Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer.

• 6:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Um, urban legend, uh, Final Destination.

• 6:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Final Destination.

• 6:23Chris Winterbauer?

  This, it's great. Um, every time I see a semi truck carrying logs.

• 6:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, do not stand behind it.

• 6:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Forever scarred. So the slashers of the seventies and eighties always to me felt a little bit stale by comparison. And by the time you and I were going to the video store, we were on to Halloween six and Nightmare on Elm Street four and Dream Warriors. And although some of them are really fun and campy, um, we had already explored the frame around the movies, you know, by the time we were kids. But I will say Freddie of all of those villains, right? You have Jason Voorhees eventually, Michael Myers, Leatherface. Freddie scared me the most of those villains growing up. I don't know why, but my theory is that it's because you can see his eyes.

• 7:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Whereas with all of these other villains, you can't see their eyes. There's, there's a deadness there. Whereas with Freddie, there's some personality to it and we'll get to the decision that led to that. But, uh, for me, it was always Freddie and the face hugger from Alien. They very much scared me. And I agree, Lizzie, this movie is very campy. It's very hokey. The dialogue is clunky to say the least in many instances. But I would argue that it has some, well, you did mention this, some really inventive, uh, set pieces.

• 7:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Very.

• 7:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And, and some surprisingly horrifying imagery. And I, I, for my money, I do think Tina's death at the end of the first reel is both very unexpected because they kind of set her up as the protagonist.

• 7:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Right? She has the most screen time in the first 15 minutes. You think, oh, perhaps this is going to be the final girl. And, uh, Heather Langenkamp's Nancy is going to be the supporting character. And then Tina is killed in a really shocking, big set piece moment as she's thrown through the room.

• 8:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Scream is definitely ripping from this with, you know, Drew Barrymore a hundred percent, which I didn't realize.

• 8:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Scream rips in so many interesting ways from this movie and Skeet Ulrich's character is such a riff on it. It's like a combination. Of Rod and Glenn, I feel like in so many ways. And even the way he climbs the trestle to get into her bedroom and all those things.

• 8:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Two other things. One is the fact that Johnny Depp as Glenn is supposed to be a jock. That got the biggest surprise from me in the entire movie was when.

• 8:43Chris Winterbauer?

  His little football uniform.

• 8:46Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's because all of a sudden she's like, well, you're the jock. And I was like, he's very slim. And also just the number of moms in this who were just drunk on the couch. This, the subtitle of this movie should really just be Nightmare on Elm Street. Moms need some sleep like that's, that's all this was is drunk moms being like, how does she have a little nap, sweetheart?

• 9:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very much a latchkey kid generation film. And there were, there was more thought than you might expect to put behind those decisions to make the parents drunks. That we'll get into in terms of the lore.

• 9:22Lizzie Bassett?

  One other thing I have to mention, because I believe that they share an actor. You know, when you mentioned like, and I've mentioned these movies, some of these slashers don't necessarily hold up as much for people of our generation. There's one that does, and it's one of the earliest ones. And I think Black Christmas does, and there's a different quality to it. That's not, that I don't think you see in something like this, maybe because the genre actually, I could be wrong, but I think was relatively established prior to this movie coming out. So that's the one thing I would say is like, this doesn't necessarily feel as inventive as some of the earlier slashers, nor does it feel as scary as some of the ones that we grew up with. So it's in like a bit of a weird middle place.

• 10:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I think for me, that may be true, but I think that the hook is really strong.

• 10:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And that is that Freddy can invade your dreams. Now, does the logic as played out on screen fully make sense in many of these scenes? I have no idea. I could not follow at least two or three of the kills and we will get to the ending, which is wonky by admission by all involved. But one other thing I really love about this movie is like you said, you can see so many elements here that are. More fully realized in Wes Craven's later works. And you mentioned Scream. Scream is a big one. And obviously Kevin Williamson is playing within the genre. But I think in a lot of ways, Craven is starting to learn how to color outside the lines. And he wants to find ways to work more humor into the story.

• 10:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's still figuring that out. And I think that he very much comes into his own by the early 90s. And this is very much a forerunner to that. Okay, let's talk details because this story is fascinating. And this was a nightmare of a shoot. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 horror film written and directed by Wes Craven. It was produced by Robert Shea or Bob Shea, who was going to be our co protagonist alongside Wes Craven, along with Sarah Risher, John H. Burrows and more. It was distributed importantly by New Line Cinema. Quick disclosure, I did make a movie with New Line Cinema a few years ago. None of the people that worked on this movie were at New Line Cinema when I worked with them.

• 11:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I had a lovely time. The folks at New Line Cinema are fantastic. If you get the opportunity to work with them, you should. It stars Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson, Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, John Saxon as absent father Lieutenant Donald Thompson, Ronnie Blakely as drunk mother Marge Thompson, Johnny Depp in his first onscreen appearance as Glenn Lance, and Amanda Wiss as Tina Gray, and Jay Sue Garcia as Rod. As always, the IMDb logline reads, "Teenager Nancy Thompson must uncover the dark truth concealed by her parents after she and her friends become targets of the spirit of a serial killer with a bladed glove in their dreams,

• 12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  in which if they die, it kills them in real life."

• 12:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, that's my other favorite part about this movie was that it starts with a little arts and crafts. I like that. He's on Etsy. He's making his own products. Good for Freddy.

• 12:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think that what this movie may have been missing is the Dr. Loomis expository character.

• 12:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Who is helping explore the mystery behind why Freddy exists as opposed to the just complete exposition dump at the end of act two by Nancy's mother that comes completely out of nowhere.

• 13:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Nancy's daughter is like, hey, come here, come look in this boiler room downstairs. Come look at the ashes. I burned him alive. You're like, whoa, what?

• 13:09Chris Winterbauer?

  He killed 20 kids.

• 13:11Lizzie Bassett?

  20 children.

• 13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And she's never heard of this.

• 13:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 13:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I guess, yeah, no internet.

• 13:16Chris Winterbauer?

  No internet. Sources for today's episode, which were found largely on the internet, include, but are not limited to Freddy Lives: An Oral History of a Nightmare on Elm Street by Vulture, Don't Fall Asleep: The Oral History of a Nightmare on Elm Street by The Ringer, Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven by Brian Robb, Welcome to Primetime: The Documentary, Never Sleep Again: The Making of Nightmare on Elm Street: The Documentary, and Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy by Tommy Hudson, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. Now, Lizzie, the story of a nightmare on Elm Street is really a story of dreams and how sometimes the only way to realize our dreams is to embrace our nightmares. Now,

• 14:01Chris Winterbauer?

  let's talk a little bit about sleep. You're a new parent. You're probably pretty short on sleep, I would imagine.

• 14:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Recently, you said that you came across a photo of me shortly after my daughter was born, and it actually was inspiring to you because I believe you said I looked so bad in that picture.

• 14:19Lizzie Bassett?

  You looked near death.

• 14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  That the fact that I look even average now is a miracle.

• 14:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Aspirational.

• 14:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Inspirational, aspirational. There we go. Well, for some people, the problem is he isn't falling asleep. It's waking up. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

• 14:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I am.

• 14:39Chris Winterbauer?

  A well documented phenomenon, not one I've personally experienced. The inability to move or speak while being fully aware of one's surroundings. There are documentaries about this phenomenon. It has spawned often terrifying myths in many cultures. A couple of examples. The Caribbean myth of the kokma, the souls of unbaptized babies smother slumberers, or the Karabassan in Turkey, in which sufferers are visited by a wicked supernatural entity wearing a wide brimmed hat and strangled. The Babadook, anybody?

• 15:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, gay icon Babadook?

• 15:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Also, Freddie. In 1981, the CDC started tracking a disturbing trend. Seemingly healthy and relatively young men were failing to wake up at all. They were literally dying in their sleep. Most were under 45 years old. The mean age was 33 and all were Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia displaced by the Vietnam War. Now, many of their families reported that they heard these victims choke, gurgle, gasp for air, and then they suddenly passed away. The first reported case occurred in 1977, but 81 was the peak. Lizzie, in 1981, a total of 26 of these young men died in their sleep, almost all between the time of 10:00 PM and 8:00 AM, and nobody knew what was killing them.

• 16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  There were a lot of theories, stress, maybe exposure to nerve agents during the Vietnam War, or even terror inducing nightmares. They were linked to a certain heart issue, but they are still not entirely understood, hence the name sudden unexplained nocturnal death. So, the LA Times ran several stories about these night deaths, and one of them caught the eye of an up and coming director, Wes Craven. We were unable to find the specific article that Craven saw, but we do have his recollection of the details, which I'll read. I happened across a newspaper story of a young man in Los Angeles who had suffered from nightmares in which he was pursued by a monstrous man intent on killing him. So real were the dreams that this kid decided to stop sleeping.

• 16:45Chris Winterbauer?

  He stayed awake a day, two days, three, four, until his family worried for his very sanity. His father, a physician, gave him sleeping pills. And finally, one evening, while watching TV with his family, he at last fell asleep. His father carried him to his bedroom and tucked him in. The family went to bed, thinking the crisis was finally over. Then, in the middle of the night, they heard him screaming. They rushed to his room to see him thrashing on his bed. Before they got to him, he fell still and was dead. An autopsy found no physical harm. His father discovered uningested sleeping pills. His mother found a long extension cord that led to a coffee maker in the boy's closet, full of hot, black coffee.

• 17:28Chris Winterbauer?

  This story haunted Wes Craven because he had suffered nightmares as a child. And when he asked his mother to protect him, she put him back to bed and told him, "Sleep is the one place where everyone has to go alone."

• 17:45Lizzie Bassett?

  What is the scariest nightmare you've ever had?

• 17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Ooh, that's a good question. I don't know about scariest. When I saw aliens for the first time, the scene where Newt and Ripley are in the med bay and the face hugger is loose, I had nightmares about that scene, the face hugger. And I had nightmares about the idea of aliens getting to Earth. It like that concept, once it clicked for me, I thought, oh, the world would just end. And that's terrifying that we would do something like that. So that freaked me out quite a bit. I don't know. How about you?

• 18:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I vividly remember the one that scared me the most. I was, it was a lucid dream. So I woke up in my dream. I was in my bedroom. I was maybe 10 years old and I looked. Down my hallway and the way my bedroom was situated was you could see straight down the long dark hallway that led towards the other end of the house. And in the hallway, in sort of the shadows underneath a window, there was like something that was crouching in the corner. And I thought it was my dog, Lulu. And so I called out and said, Lulu, come here. And she came around the corner and walked past the thing that was in the corner. And then I realized it wasn't her. And I remember not being able to move and just staring as this thing sort of slowly

• 19:08Lizzie Bassett?

  started to move closer towards the end of my bed. And then I woke up.

• 19:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was the Babadook.

• 19:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, if it was, Babadook's kind of friendly.

• 19:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. And that's where you got your sense of style. Well, Wes Craven, given his name and the parenting style he grew up under, perhaps it's unsurprising that he found himself working in the horror genre, but it was surprising to him. So Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1939. He was raised in a strict Baptist household. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no comic books, no movies, with the exception of a few Disney films. So as a result, he spent a lot of time and energy and study on things other than the physical or material reality of this world. It was a very fundamentalist upbringing.

• 19:58Chris Winterbauer?

  He was very concerned with good and evil. His father was terrifying, short-tempered, largely absent. And despite the strict rules of his house, his childhood was rocky. His parents divorced when he was four. His dad died of a heart attack two years later. And failure didn't just surround him, it sprouted from inside of him. So as part of his faith, it was up to him to find Jesus and welcome Jesus into his heart, literally. And he failed to do that. And so he said that he had this very dark view of himself, that he felt he had not accomplished, you know, the thing that he needed to achieve in his community. He attended a Christian college, Wheaton in Chicago. He studied English and psychology, and this is where he finally gets exposed to the world

• 20:42Chris Winterbauer?

  of film, but specifically arthouse film. Bunuel, Fellini, Bergman, surreal, fantastical movies. And Craven specifically finds refuge in dreams. He starts to practice remembering and documenting his dreams. He gets a master's in writing and philosophy at Johns Hopkins. And then he falls into academia. He becomes a teacher. He gets married. This is what his parents wanted him to do. But deep down, he had this dream that nagged at him. A dream to make movies. A dream to make a very specific genre of movie. Any guesses, Lizzie?

• 21:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Romantic comedies.

• 21:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Pretty close. Comedy movies.

• 21:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 21:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 1968, he's 29 years old. He is a teacher and he acted as a director of photography for a student film, a 45-minute spoof of Mission Impossible. But there wasn't really room for his dreams in his professional life. The chairman of his department sits him down and says, Wes, it's time to get serious. You either need to get your PhD or your ass is grass. We're putting you on the street. So Wes Craven quit. He moved to New York. He was four years married at this point. I did read that he tried to move to New York twice. The first time, he failed to land a job. He ended up teaching high school for another year, then tried again. But the point is, his first big break comes by way of future folk superstar, Harry Chapin.

• 22:06Chris Winterbauer?

  You might remember Cats in the Cradle, Lizzie. Probably his most famous song.

• 22:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 22:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. A great father-son song. Just makes you cry when you hold your boy as you're listening to it. It doesn't really work in the era of working from home. When you're coming home, Dad, I've been here the whole time. Okay, so Craven was actually friends with Harry's brother, Stephen. And Harry Chapin was working as a film editor at the time. He'd actually written and directed 1968's Legendary Champions, an Oscar-nominated documentary about boxers. So Wes Craven gets a job as his new messenger. Wes Craven's also sweeping floors. He's driving a cab. But most importantly, by hanging around Chapin, he's learning how to edit. So he racks up contacts in the industry, starts to find more and more work. He's managing post-production. He's sinking dailies.

• 22:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's closer to his dreams than ever before. He's also maybe getting into psychedelic drugs. But he is broke. He'd lost 30 pounds. He was apparently six foot two and hovered around 135 pounds.

• 23:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 23:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And for reference, I'm 6'1" and pretty gangly and I weigh 165 pounds. So I can't imagine just dropping 30. It's like Christian Bale in The Machinist is a little lighter than that for point of reference. He didn't just lose weight, he lost his relationship. By 1970, he and his first wife Bonnie divorced. She was really worried about the insecurity of his creative pursuits, something that Wes Craven said she was absolutely justified to be concerned about. But his big break was just around the corner.

• 23:45Lizzie Bassett?

  We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice. And before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince and it's all super high quality and has lasted for years without paying the brand markup. Now, obviously, you shouldn't stop at bedding. You should also refresh your closet with elevated everyday essentials that you will wear over and over again. Think cozy Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at 50 bucks, cashmere scarves, responsibly sourced down jackets and 14 karat gold jewelry. I genuinely love Quince and I shop here for everything. I walked out the door the other day and realized every single thing I was wearing was Quince, down to my socks.

• 24:30Lizzie Bassett?

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• 25:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So around 1970s, he took a job sinking dailies for director Sean Cunningham, who would go on to direct Friday the 13th. So Craven pitches in with editing, he's coordinating shooting, he even directs a few scenes, and the company that had financed this feature offers Sean Cunningham $90,000 to make a, quote, "drive-in fodder, no holds barred horror film." Basically, an exploitation film. So Cunningham turns to Craven and goes, "Hey, I'll produce, why don't you write, direct, and edit it?" Craven thinks, "This is an enormous opportunity." The only problem, he doesn't know anything about horror. He'd never written a horror script, and in fact, in one interview, he claims he'd never even seen a horror movie before. I don't know if I believe that, but it is what he said.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Cunningham was a very smart producer. He goes, "You were raised as a fundamentalist. Pull that stuff out of your closet." Translation: Forget the dreams of comedy, tap into your nightmares. So one weekend, Wes Craven sits down, and he comes up with something truly horrific. It's the story of two teenage girls who are raped and murdered by a sadistic gang of prison escapees. These killers then unwittingly wind up at the family home of one of their victims. The victim's parents put two and two together and exact revenge on the men, murdering them in heinous ways. There's a bit of penis, chainsaws. It's grindhouse exploitation at best, borderline snuff film at worst.

• 26:57Chris Winterbauer?

  But Craven had actually been inspired by the arthouse European cinema he'd first seen at Wheaton, because the storyline was very much pulled from Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film, The Virgin Spring. Have you ever seen The Virgin Spring, Lizzie?

• 27:09Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 27:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a tough watch, but it's an important film. It was set in medieval Sweden, and it follows a father who realizes that the herders that he's taken in to give shelter for the night are responsible for the rape and murder of his daughter, and then he kills them one by one. So the structure of the story is very much the same. Craven called his film Sex Crimes of the Century, but it would eventually be released under a different name. And I don't know if you've seen this film, Lizzy, but I'm sure you'll recognize the name, The Last House on the Left.

• 27:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So it is a shocking film, although it feels a little dated. You know, if you were to watch it now, and it was remade later with Tony Goldwyn. But when it was released in 1972, it really shocked and disgusted audiences, but it also entertained. And it got surprisingly good critical reviews. Roger Ebert wrote that The Last House on the Left is a tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that's about four times as good as you'd expect. So all of a sudden, Wes Craven is a bit of an insider in the film business. But this movie made him an outsider in his personal life. As he later said, "People literally wouldn't leave their children alone with me. They would get up and walk away from the table when I went out to have dinner." He was frustrated. He hadn't set out to be a horror director. He just wanted to direct.

• 28:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So he tried to make nice movies. He tried to make comedies and dramas. But nobody wanted his beauty contest spoof script, which was called American Beauty.

• 28:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 28:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Or Mustang, his war thriller, following Colonel Anthony Herbert, who'd claimed he witnessed Vietnam war crimes only to be silenced by his commanding officer. And now, it's possible that the transition I'm about to describe occurred earlier and that this timeline's more porous than I'm presenting. Wes Craven ventured, it seems by necessity, into adult films. So, produced by Peter Locke, who Craven had met while cutting Peter Locke's "You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat", which featured Richard Pryor and Robert Downey Sr., Wes Craven worked on a number of pornographic films in the early 70s. He's credited as an editor, assistant director, and an actor on the X-rated It Happened in Hollywood.

• 29:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He cut the R-rated sex comedy Kitty Can't Help It. And he directed, under a pseudonym Abe Snake, The Fireworks Woman, amongst others.

• 29:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. What's the plot of that one? I hope everyone gets to keep their appendages.

• 29:31Chris Winterbauer?

  You can find it online, I will say that, but I don't know if you're gonna watch it for the plot. Locke and Craven's work in the adult industry was more necessity, I think, than desire. Locke would later go on to produce The Brave Little Toaster, of all things, a movie I really love, as well as But I'm a Cheerleader, a movie I also really like. And he kept asking Wes Craven to make another horror movie. Wes, you know, forget the dreams of comedy, you're good at horror, follow the nightmares. So Craven finally does. 1977's The Hills Have Eyes. Lizzie, have you seen everybody's favorite desert mutant family movie, The Hills Have Eyes?

• 30:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Naturally.

• 30:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, also remade, I kinda like the remake, too. It's considered Craven's breakout film. So by 1981, there's no question, he is a horror director. He had just come off co-writing and directing Deadly Blessing, which was his first, quote, "big budget horror film." It was big for Craven, it cost $2.5 million, more than his first three films combined. So he takes six months off to write about dreams and how sometimes they can be fatal. So these were inspired by the articles he read in the New York Times, and he started two scripts, one about a dream lover and another about a dream killer. Now, Lizzie, the dream killer script had two tentative titles. One was A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the other one was Dream Skill.

• 30:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Not Dreams Kill, but actually Dreams Skill, like they talk about learning skills.

• 30:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a bit of a Shershank reduction situation where there's just too much to think through.

• 31:04Chris Winterbauer?

  The scrimshank reduction. Now Freddy Krueger was inspired both by that LA Times article and Craven's personal life. So Freddy was the name of one of his childhood bullies, and Krueger was an extension of Krug, one of the villains from The Last House on the Left. By making it Kruger, he made it sound, according to Craven, more like a Nazi, which would get us clearly, you know, on the side opposite of Kruger.

• 31:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It was also a bit darker. So in the early version of the script, Kruger was not just a child murderer, he was also a pedophile or a child molester. And Craven envisioned him as an older man in his 60s or 70s who wore the top hat.

• 31:44Lizzie Bassett?

  He does. I mean, he seems old in this. I know he's like burned to a crisp, but you know, he gives off creepy old man vibes.

• 31:51Chris Winterbauer?

  He does, although he's played by a relatively young actor. So Kruger was very much pulled from Wes Craven's childhood. When he was seven years old, he woke to the sound of shuffling outside of his window. Out on the sidewalk was a man who looked like what we would eventually get with Freddy. The man looks and turns to look directly at Craven. Craven's terrified, so he steps back into the shadows, steps back to the window, sure the man must be gone by now, man's still standing there staring at him. The man then walks to the corner, looking back over his shoulder at this seven-year-old boy, kind of leering at him, and then quickly cuts around the corner, which is toward the entrance of the building.

• 32:34Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 32:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And Wes thinks, oh, God, this guy's gonna come in here and murder me. So he wakes up and his whole family, blah, blah, blah. Nobody finds, the man had walked off and was clearly just messing with this boy, but this image stayed with him forever. So the material's very personal. Oh, and there is a funny story that I should mention. He would apparently go, he would write it in a bathrobe and a helmet with the little pike on top, and he just typed the pages in his back house all day. And then he'd go into his house and he would read the pages with his second wife, Mimi, who ends up playing the nurse in the sleep clinic in the final film.

• 33:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 33:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So she said she knew every single line to that script because he would just come inside and they'd read and read and read and then he'd rewrite. So Sean Cunningham was skeptical that an audience would buy into the idea that dreams are dangerous, but Wes Craven was confident. This script is a slam dunk. I am a successful horror director. I've got three films under my belt. So he sends it around town and everybody passes.

• 33:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody wants it. Now, it doesn't help that Swamp Thing, which he released in 1982, bombed. Now, I will say Swamp Thing became a cult classic. I loved that movie growing up. Did really well in home video and cable. I did read that, according to some sources, Disney was interested in making A Nightmare on Elm Street into a kid-friendly movie, which, on the one hand, I can't fully understand. But on the other hand, something like Time Bandits is actually kind of freaky, and that was a little bit marketed at kids, and maybe like an Are You Afraid of the Dark sort of vibe.

• 34:08Lizzie Bassett?

  By the way, that gave me nightmares. I had to stop watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? That episode with the alien eggs in the swimming pool, that was dark for kids.

• 34:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a good show. Or the one with the magical soup. That's the one I remember. So, nobody wanted... By the way, Wes Craven says he has no recollection of Disney wanting to make this into a children's movie. Nobody wanted Wes Craven's nightmare, except for a man named Robert Shea. Now, we have talked about Robert Shea on this podcast. Lizzie, you may remember him as the man who took maybe the greatest leap of faith in the history of modern cinema by greenlighting Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.

• 34:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 34:52Chris Winterbauer?

  But at this time, Bob Shea was a scrappy upstart trying to find footing in Hollywood. Now, like Wes Craven, he had been an academic eager to please his parents. He had dreams of working in entertainment, but they seemed impossibly far away. He was born in 39, the same year as Craven. They were born within five months of each other, I believe. But he was born in Detroit, Michigan, and, as we learned from Sam Raimi, what could be further away from Hollywood than Detroit, Michigan? So Shea follows the more practical path, the one that actually Raimi kind of eschews. He studies business at the University of Michigan. He then attends the Sorbonne in Paris. He then goes to Columbia Law School and specializes in copyright law.

• 35:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he became a Fulbright scholar and went on to study at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Little tie-in to Virgin Spring.

• 35:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Damn.

• 35:46Chris Winterbauer?

  He is obviously very, very smart, very shrewd.

• 35:51Chris Winterbauer?

  But the only courses he did well in were entertainment law-related. He dabbled in writing, directing and producing, and he was talented. While he was at Columbia, he made a short film called Image. You can find it on YouTube and it tied for first place in the Rosenthal competition. Lizzie, the other winner, it was a movie called What Is a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? And it was directed by a young Martin Scorsese.

• 36:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 36:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So by 1967, Bob Shay's done with school. He's back in New York. He gets a job at the Museum of Modern Art as the head of the Film Stills Archive. He meets a man at a party who tells him that distributing films on college campuses is a big business. This is the era of distribution is not centralized at this point in time. It's very regional.

• 36:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Isn't this also how Sam Raimi was getting Evil Dead off the ground too?

• 36:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. You could sell the rights, not just international, domestic, but region by region within the United States, campus by campus. Bob Shay suddenly felt like film wasn't so abstract because his dad had been in the wholesale grocery business. And he realized, maybe I wasn't meant to make movies. Maybe I was meant to distribute them. So roughly a year before Craven arrives in New York, Bob Shay takes his first leap of faith and he founds New Line Cinema.

• 37:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 37:15Chris Winterbauer?

  In his words, "It began in a five-story walk-up in a rent-controlled apartment on Second Avenue and 15th Street. It was $109 a month for the office, the bedroom and my kids' rooms."

• 37:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my God. I hope he held on to it.

• 37:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, seriously. Well, far from the flush Hollywood studios, New Line Cinema was run lean. Money was tight and their niche was very narrow. They started with foreign films. Werner Herzog's Fatamorgana, even dwarfs started small, which we discussed on our episode on Fitzcarraldo. And then they expanded into US independent film, including a lot of early John Waters works, for example. But Bob Shay was really shrewd and he drew on his background in copyright law and started picking up films that had entered the public domain. Also took a really generous approach with filmmakers. He would offer structuring deals for distributions as 50/50 profit-sharing pacts. So New Line Cinema might not have the marketing muscle or distribution might of a larger competitor, but they could offer better terms.

• 38:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I do want to be clear, though. Throughout the research, I don't get the sense that Bob Shay was doing this out of the goodness of his heart, but rather because it was a way for him to stay competitive in a really competitive marketplace where he didn't have a lot of money. One article that we found described him as a volatile figure at the best of times, who frequently clashed with his directors. So early successes included Pink Flamingos, The Street Fighter. They did a re-release of 1938's Reefer Madness. 10 years in, they expand into film production. They released 1977's Stunts. This is like an action-packed murder mystery about stuntmen, and it grosses $2 million against a $200,000 budget. But just because New Line's having some success doesn't mean that Hollywood's gonna let them in.

• 38:55Chris Winterbauer?

  In 1978, they distributed a French-Belgian co-production starring Gerard de Bardou called Get Out Your Hanker Shifts that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Bob Shay got drunk, went around and told everybody, "We won the Academy Award", and then got denied entrance to a big after-party. So New Line always had to chase the money, and there was a lot of money in horror. So they started re-releasing horror films from the early 60s and 70s and then producing their own. And Lizzie, as you mentioned, they famously distributed Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. So in the early 80s, Shay is visiting LA to take general meetings with up-and-coming horror directors, including Toby Hooper, I read, was one of the people that he met with. So he gets on the phone with Wes Craven. And they're talking, talking, talking.

• 39:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And the way Shay describes it is that nobody's really interested in giving him their script because their New Line is so bottom of the barrel that the only way they're gonna go with them is if they've gotten passes from everywhere else. And so at the end of the phone call, Wes Craven kind of reveals, "Well, I do have this one thing that could be kind of interesting. You know, it's about kids getting murdered in their nightmares." And Bob Shay thinks, "This is great. Everybody has nightmares. This is universal." Send me the script. According to one source, Craven did not send him the script and wouldn't send him the script because New Line, he doesn't think, has the money to actually make this movie. As he later put it, "They would distribute to army bases, prisons, and colleges. Those were the three venues, so I figured this guy is never gonna raise the money."

• 40:22Chris Winterbauer?

  But he underestimated Bob Shay, so Craven's chasing the studios and Shay is chasing Craven. And so finally, the studios have said no, and Craven relents, and New Line Cinema Options, A Nightmare on Elm Street, for basically $5,000. And Bob Shay and Wes Craven are in business. So Wes flies out to New York, summer of 1983, and they start writing together. They're rewriting the script, polishing the script, and meanwhile, Bob Shay's taking a crack at raising money, because even though A Nightmare on Elm Street is gonna be cheap for Hollywood, it's gonna be expensive for New Line Cinema. So, Lizzie, initial budget, Bob Shay asserts, was $700,000. One quarter of what Wes Craven had on his last film.

• 41:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's not very much.

• 41:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Especially considering the amount of practical effects and stunts that you're doing in this movie.

• 41:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Shay, it then went up to 1.1 million. And as he said, "All the investors at one time or another backed out during pre-production."

• 41:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 41:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Half the funding came from a Yugoslavian guy who had a girlfriend he wanted in the movie. Another source notes that Shay put up some of his own money, and he did strike a deal with Smart Egg Productions, who advanced $1 million to start the film. In the end, Craven says that Shay only really managed to pull together half of what he felt he needed to make the movie, but with Swamp Thing bombing, this was really all he had going. It's now or never. So they start casting the movie. And, Lizzie, a big benefit of having no money is you can't afford any stars.

• 41:55Lizzie Bassett?

  True, don't have to deal with them.

• 41:57Chris Winterbauer?

  So you don't even waste any time going after it. In fact, the original plan was to hire a stunt man to play Freddy Krueger.

• 42:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense.

• 42:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, this was common practice. Bud Davis as the Phantom in The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Dick Warlock as Michael Myers in Halloween 2, Steve Dash as Jason in Friday the 13th Part 2, while Jason is masked, Richard Brooker in Friday the 13th Part 3. So like, masked roles require precision actions and heavy suits and makeup. These are perfect for stunt performers with extreme body control. And also, they're gonna light Freddy on fire in this movie, for example. But Freddy was different. Craven realized early on, he wanted a Shakespearean actor for this part. And I, I wonder if part of it is that even though Freddie technically wears a mask and that he's wearing this burned skin, you can see his eyes.

• 42:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And so you need a performer that can really convey Freddie's depravity.

• 42:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 42:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Through their expressiveness. He said he wanted Freddie to convey more depth and personality than the standard wordless villains of slasher films. And that's another departure. Freddie talks a lot in this movie. He is verbose.

• 43:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:09Chris Winterbauer?

  At times, I wanted to say,

• 43:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Shut up.

• 43:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Shut your mouth, Freddie. Shut up.

• 43:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Shut up.

• 43:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Get on, start slashing.

• 43:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Come here. Get out of here. Freddie's gonna get ya.

• 43:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I love when he first starts chasing her and he's running, just like a little, he looks like he's a gorilla, just learning how to run.

• 43:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Craven realized he also needed to age the character down from the septuagenarian that he'd originally envisioned because older actors, Lizzie, didn't have that pizzazz or energy or zest that he was looking for.

• 43:41Lizzie Bassett?

  He does have a lust for life.

• 43:44Chris Winterbauer?

  He does. And these older actors were also, according to Craven, too sweet. There was something about them having seen so much of life that there was a certain tenderness to them. They couldn't really be evil. So Wes Craven started looking at actors in their 40s. And there's a rumor that English actor David Warner, who you guys would recognize now from Titanic or Coneheads, my sister's favorite movie. He'd most recently been in Time Bandits, Tron, The Omen. There's a rumor that he was not only very seriously considered, but makeup artist David B. Miller said he actually did a makeup test on him. Now, this is debated, and Shay, Craven, and Warner himself have all denied that he was considered. But casting director Annette Benson did say that Craven wanted a David Warner type, meaning a really big monster type.

• 44:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Remember, Warner's roughly six foot two. They seriously considered actor Richard Moll, who was six foot eight. Benson says she's pretty sure that they offered him the role, but he turned it down. We couldn't find confirmation. The point is, by the time they bring in character actor Robert Englund, he couldn't have been further from the really big monster type. Now, Lizzie, have you seen Robert Englund? Outside of his Freddy makeup, around the time that Nightmare on Elm Street was released.

• 45:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I'm really only familiar with him as he appears much older, I think.

• 45:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Let me show you a photo of the very cute.

• 45:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Robert Englund.

• 45:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Very cute.

• 45:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So he is cherubic. I think he looks, if anything, more suited to playing a hobbit.

• 45:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Very hobbity.

• 45:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He was five foot nine. He had auditioned for Benson when she was casting National Lampoon's Class Reunion. He had mostly done television. He was a character actor, and he just started to get noticed for his role as a sweet and socially awkward alien in the sci-fi miniseries V.

• 45:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, which they remade.

• 45:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm. But he was a classically trained theater actor. He had performed Shakespeare, and Benson knew he had the depth that Craven was looking for. And he was also available. His show had gotten greenlit as a series, and during the hiatus, the only job he auditioned for that fit his schedule was a Nightmare on Elm Street. So he goes into the audition, and right before he does, he licks his finger, dips it in the ashtray in his car, he rubs the ash under his eyes, he greases his hair back, he channels Klaus Kinski from Herzog's Nosferatu, and he makes a point to just stare at Craven as long as he can without blinking. And Craven's sitting there like, this guy is really young. He's really cheerful looking.

• 46:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He's kind of got some baby fat on his face, and he's too short. And Englund's looking at Craven thinking, this guy doesn't look like the master of darkness. Now, he had actually seen some clips from The Last House on the Left and The Hills of Eyes at these goth bars that he hung around, and he was expecting a goth director. And have you seen Wes Craven? He's just like a normal-looking, normal-looking dude.

• 46:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's a normal man.

• 46:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Dresses a bit like a dad.

• 46:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Englund described him as a young Don Quixote in Ralph Lauren. So. Neither of the men had the look that they expected from the other, but they both had the drive to make something dark. So Craven was won over by Englund's willingness to go to the dark places in his own mind. Here's the full quote. "I've found that where actors fail playing evil is that certain people simply are unwilling to admit that it's in them. In my theory, it's in all of us, and you can tap into it. And it doesn't mean that that is what you are, but you simply acknowledge that part of you." So Englund was very willing to acknowledge there was something dark inside of him, and a new type of monster was born.

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• 48:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, you mentioned Heather Langenkamp, Nancy, in this film. She was a newcomer, especially a newcomer to the horror scene.

• 48:14Lizzie Bassett?

  She looks pretty young.

• 48:15Chris Winterbauer?

  She is. She was from Oklahoma. She'd actually gotten her SAG card. This is a funny story. She got her SAG card because she got a job as an extra on Francis Ford Coppola's Rumblefish. She'd also been in an extra on The Outsiders. And they randomly threw her a line. And the line ended up getting cut from the film, but that got her her SAG card.

• 48:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 48:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And so that's how she got into film. She actually got into Stanford, and then she was taking time off from attending Stanford in order to audition for parts. She'd lost out on a part in 1984's Night of the Comet, which had been cast by Benson. She gets brought in to read for Nancy and immediately thinks, oh, my God, why did I leave Stanford for this? She goes into this casting office. There wasn't any furniture. She thought this is so much worse than I thought. But then the audition went great and they called her back and she read a scene with Amanda Wiss. Wiss had also auditioned for Nancy but was being considered for Tina and Wiss's agents were saying, "Don't do this. It'll ruin your career. Nobody does horror." Now, she was the more experienced of the two. She'd done some TV stuff. She'd had a small role on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And so they performed the scene where Nancy

• 49:20Chris Winterbauer?

  tells Tina about her nightmare and Lizzie, "This is where we get your nails on a chalkboard because that's when Langenkamp nervously made the decision to make the claw gesture and the nail screeching sound that you see and hear in the movie."

• 49:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 49:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Craven loved it and they had the job.

• 49:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, so did he not always have his little arts and crafts hand?

• 49:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He had the arts and crafts hand, but the decision to pantomime that motion and sound was Langenkamp's.

• 49:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing. Yeah, that's such a, you know, vivid image throughout the movie. I especially love, one of the first really cool practical effects is when she's laying in the bed in Tina's house and the wall behind her, he sort of presses through the wall behind her and then recedes. Very clever.

• 50:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you can see a lot of how they make those special effects on YouTube or if you watch the documentary that I mentioned. I'm gonna skip over some of those details because again, they're more suited for a visual medium, but there's a lot of interesting stuff there. Also, I do want to mention, did you interpret this when, I believe it's when Tina wakes up and her gown has been sliced and the way her mom reacts, did you interpret that as her mom suggesting that she was having a sex dream? Her mom said basically like-

• 50:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't. Her mom said, "You have to cut your nails."

• 50:38Chris Winterbauer?

  "You have to cut your nails or stop having dreams like those." I interpreted that as like a weird masturbation joke or comment.

• 50:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I thought it was more like, wow, her mom must be real drunk a lot of the time if Tina's been waking up with shredded clothes and she's like, "You just remember stuff having those dreams to cut your nails to be dead."

• 50:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I couldn't, I could not figure out a way to square that circle. Audience members, let us know what you think.

• 51:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It was like on her chest. I don't think, I don't know. I could be totally wrong.

• 51:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know either. What I do know is that Johnny Depp was not cast for his acting chops. So-

• 51:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's talk about the most famous member of this cast. Johnny Depp as Nancy's boyfriend Glenn Lance, noted athlete. Craven offered the part.

• 51:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Who is just so not affected by anything happening in this horror movie the entire time. Hey, Nets, you probably calm down. Just the whole time. Also, he's the worst at literally everything. And this is not Johnny Depp's fault, but his only job in this entire movie is don't fall asleep. And it's, he falls asleep over and over and over again.

• 51:39Chris Winterbauer?

  In terms of homages to the love interest who lives across the street in It Follows is such an homage to Glenn's character in this film. So Craven offered the part to a much better known actor, Charlie Sheen.

• 51:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 51:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Wes Craven claims that Sheen passed because he and his agent wanted double scale. All the actors were getting paid scale. And even though that wasn't very much money, it would have been the difference between about a thousand dollars a week versus two thousand dollars a week.

• 52:06Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a lot, especially back then.

• 52:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, well, New Line said, no way, that's, you know, it's just out of our budget. Now, Sheen has disputed this, and he said that he just didn't understand the script. He actually claims that he met with Craven and told him he didn't see a guy wearing a funny hat with a rotted face and a striped sweater and a bunch of clickety-clackety fingers catching on. He also said, I didn't want to be eaten by a bear. And I, I, I believe that, that Sheen just didn't, I mean, I don't know why he would admit that he didn't get it, you know what I mean, instead of the, the money thing. But, but again, two different accounts. So Craven goes with an actor who couldn't afford to be so picky. Johnny Depp is 20 years old. He's an LA transplant, less than a year into his new life in Tinseltown.

• 52:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Fresh out of Kentucky, right?

• 52:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, playing in a band called The Kids, and he's selling pens over the phone in a very Jordan Belfort sort of turn. He befriended Nicolas Cage, then Coppola, who suggested, hey, man, you should get into acting, and introduced him to his agent, because that's apparently how everything got done back then. And Benson says that said agent called and pitched Depp. But Wes Craven claims that Depp's bandmate, Jeff Levine, who played the coroner in the film, came to him directly and gave him Depp's headshot. Either way. Depp comes in and auditions and lucky for Depp, Wes Craven's 14-year-old daughter and her friend just so happened to be visiting that day. They took turns reading the part of Nancy during Depp's audition and after the read,

• 53:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Depp sets out the headshots of everybody he's considering and they go, you know, who would you pick? And they both say, him, Johnny Depp. And he says, why? And they go, he's beautiful.

• 53:40Lizzie Bassett?

  He's just bored enough to make them wonder, mm, why doesn't he like me more?

• 53:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Craven said he thought he looked like he needed a bath and didn't understand why his daughters were so into him. Now, Jay Zoo Garcia, AKA Nick Corry, landed the final part as Rod Lane, very much a forerunner to Billy Loomis in Scream. But unlike Depp, Lizzie, he'd moved to LA specifically to act when he was 13 years old. He was the son of Cuban immigrants. He had some success and then the work dried up for two years. He also looks like a very tall Latin Michael Jackson of that era.

• 54:17Lizzie Bassett?

  He's very handsome.

• 54:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He's got a Goldblum-esque silhouette that he cuts, but he's got a prettier face than, although Goldblum's also a handsome guy. Now, as I fantasize about Jeff Goldblum, let's get back to Jay Zoo Garcia. He was at a low point in his career and his life when he got this job. He was 19, he was homeless, he was dabbling with drugs and he landed Nightmare. So this cast of complete unknowns were, as I mentioned, all paid scale, $1,142 per week, according to Bob Shay. But they needed a couple of semi-recognizable names. This was a condition of their deal with Smart Egg Productions. So Nancy's parents were played by two accomplished performers. I don't know if you recognize John Saxon from anything.

• 55:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that is who I recognize. He's in Black Christmas, isn't he?

• 55:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I believe so. And he'd also been across Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon. He'd earned a Golden Globe for his role in The Appaloosa, opposite Marlon Brando, and he had been a mainstay in a number of westerns. And then Ronnie Blakely, I don't know if you remember her from Robert Altman's Nashville. She plays Barbara Jean. She'd been Oscar nominated for that turn a few years prior. She was an established musician and recording artist. So these were definitely both much heavier hitters than any of the kids who had been brought in for this film. Now, you mentioned the practical effects in this movie, Lizzie, and I think they're as important as the cast, as important as the story.

• 55:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Freddy's makeup and his powers are really what define A Nightmare on Elm Street. So his mask, his burned skin, was inspired by, any guesses? A piece of food.

• 56:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Cheese.

• 56:02Chris Winterbauer?

  A pepperoni pizza.

• 56:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, delicious.

• 56:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The special effects makeup artist, David B. Miller, was toying with the cheese on his pizza at a pizza parlor. And he thought, this looks good. It looks nasty. So he took the pizza home and that became his North Star in creating Freddy's face. And I just love this idea that it's just sitting there rotting.

• 56:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, still there today.

• 56:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Developing this, still there. He brings Anglin out into his studio, which was in his garage. He sits him in an old barber's chair, shuts the door, they're completely sealed in, cranks the air conditioning. And Robert Anglin is not focused on the itchy glue or the crusty makeup brushes because Miller has given him a medical book that he's checked out from the UCLA library, full of photographs of burn victims that he's just got sitting on Anglin's lap as he's flipping through and making his makeup for hours on hours.

• 56:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 56:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Bob Shay and Wes Craven visit the garage that's out in the San Fernando Valley. And none of them really understand Miller's vision, but Miller assures them, get on set through the camera. This is gonna look great. So Freddy's face would be iconic, but it was upstaged, more or less, by one of the most startling kills in slasher history at this point. And this is Tina's death, as we've discussed, Lizzie, at Nancy's house.

• 57:17Lizzie Bassett?

  It's pretty great.

• 57:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Would you like to describe more or less what happens?

• 57:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, so she obviously is, you know, she's being chased and attacked by Freddy in her dream. I think that maybe this is where we get the very fun Freddy ripping his own face off moment early on. Then they get into her bedroom and he starts literally slashing at her with his razor hand and. You see from Rod's perspective, you know, awake, that she's being attacked by something invisible, essentially. So you're seeing invisible claw marks ripped across her, you know, belly and chest. She's just gushing blood everywhere and it's that bright red jaws blood. She's spinning around, she's spinning around on the ceiling and, you know, in the same shot as Rod, it's very clever. It's done extremely well. And yeah, she just kind of gets ripped to shreds right in front of him

• 58:07Lizzie Bassett?

  and just is covered in blood by the end of it. And then she's dead and Rod escapes through the window.

• 58:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, especially given the size of the film, this anti-gravity effect that they pull off. And obviously it's

• 58:20Lizzie Bassett?

  It's really impressive.

• 58:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. And really quickly, I do want to mention Smile, very much references Freddy pulling his own face off. And obviously this rotatable room is, becomes a mainstay in many films. And is perhaps most famously done in a hallway in Inception with Joseph Gordon-Levitt later on. So Jim Doyle is credited for the mechanical effects on the film. And this scene is one of his major contributions. So this set is a massive, rotatable room. And according to Doyle, Craven wanted to scare people so badly at the end of the first reel that they couldn't leave. And so Doyle's idea was, what if she was in her bedroom and the whole bedroom goes Looney Tunes and it goes upside down?

• 59:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And Craven asks, you can do that? And Doyle says, yeah, I can do it. I just don't know if you can afford it. So Doyle makes a deal with the production. He'll build the room and pay for it, but he gets to keep it after the production's complete and use it and rent it out to other movies.

• 59:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Where are you gonna put it?

• 59:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, in a warehouse, I'm sure. So he hires the crew, builds the room and quote, "Basically, everything up to installing the set was his responsibility." It would only pay off if the kill was so good that he could use it for other projects and make some money on it. It's a bold bet. And it works. Tina's death would go down as one of the all-time horror film deaths. Now Doyle also designed Freddy's glove, including the hero version, which we see made at the beginning of the film. And that hero version was incredibly sharp. Those knives are real Echo steak knives. And according to Doyle, every time someone put it on, they hurt themselves because if you closed your fist, the blades cut your forearms.

• 1:00:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:00:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But Doyle wasn't the only one drawing blood because Bob Shay was picking his fingernails until they bled. Because Bob Shay had a secret. Smart Egg Productions dropped out.

• 1:00:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:00:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Two weeks before production began, they lost their biggest backer. A million dollars gone. Co-producer Sarah Risher said that Bob Shay called her and he told her, "The guy who had the home video rights backed out, and that's like a third of our budget. I'm going to stay in New York and try to raise the money. Keep going." In a poetic turn, as Elm Street is falling apart, he gives a speech at an investment conference called "How to Finance Independent Productions." Back in LA, Sarah Risher is giving her own speech to the 100-person crew, begging them to stay. "The bad news is we just don't have any money to pay you this week, but the good

• 1:01:00Chris Winterbauer?

  news is we're going to be able to. We know that we will. You just have to trust me."

• 1:01:06Lizzie Bassett?

  We just don't know when.

• 1:01:07Chris Winterbauer?

  She told them how wonderful they are. She looked like she was gonna cry. She's six months pregnant. She believes that everybody stayed because they couldn't say no to a pregnant woman and they trusted her. It would end up being two weeks before New Line could pay the crew, but miraculously, nobody left. Production manager John Burrows's credit card statement would suggest that's because they did get paid in the interim. Apparently, people were starting to pack up and he put payroll on his credit card.

• 1:01:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, man.

• 1:01:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Somewhere in the range of $9,000.

• 1:01:38Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a lot of money back then.

• 1:01:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Would be a lot of money. Pre-production staggers on. The cast comes together for a read-through, but one person's missing. Director Wes Craven.

• 1:01:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:01:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Wes Craven's agent said that attending a read through when the company didn't have funds to pay the cast and crew was against the rules of the Directors Guild of America.

• 1:01:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that true?

• 1:02:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe it is one interpretation. I don't think he would have gotten nailed necessarily. This is a very small independent film, but yes. So Craven bought a bicycle and pedaled from Santa Monica to Long Beach. In a state of sadness, he'd lost his savings, he'd lost another film, he thought this was over, like this movie's done, we're out of money.

• 1:02:21Lizzie Bassett?

  They're calling him like Wes, they're all in the room.

• 1:02:23Chris Winterbauer?

  This movie's over, we're broke, I'm broke, nobody liked Swamp Thing, I'm not gonna get to make Nightmare, Bob Shay can't even get it made. And Bob Shay says, "Not so fucking fast." At the 11th hour, he makes a deal with Joe Wolfe's Media Home Entertainment. Lizzie, this deal is a literal nightmare. Media Home Entertainment would buy the home video rights for the amount needed to keep the production on track, but if New Line Cinema failed to hit certain specific line items, like buying additional prints, opening in a certain number of theaters, et cetera, Media Home Entertainment would take control of the film and New Line would get nothing. This is an all or nothing deal.

• 1:03:07Chris Winterbauer?

  New Line is all in, the company is basically being bet on this movie at this point in time.

• 1:03:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's wild, because on the paper, or like on the page, I don't know that this would stand out to me like that. He's obviously a very smart man.

• 1:03:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I think this is just more necessity than anything else, right?

• 1:03:24Lizzie Bassett?

  At this point, they're just so sunk into this, they have to keep going.

• 1:03:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Shay's not getting the top notch scripts getting sent to him at this point in time.

• 1:03:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it, got it. So we're climbing into the crevasse.

• 1:03:33Chris Winterbauer?

  We are. Cinematographer Jacques Hatkin said that Bob told him, meaning Bob Shay, and Wes Craven, that the future of the company was riding on a nightmare on Elm Street.

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• 1:04:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Principal photography began on June 11, 1984. Craven said he needed 36 days. Bob said, "You can have 30." They landed at 32. The shoot spans L.A., the Desolous Studios in Culver City, Venice. You recognize the Venice canals, I'm sure.

• 1:04:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Is this supposed to be, like, Middle America? Because it is so clearly Los Angeles.

• 1:04:49Chris Winterbauer?

  There are so many palm trees.

• 1:04:50Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a palm tree in every shot of this movie.

• 1:04:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I viewed it as, oh, maybe it's somewhere in Orange County or somewhere, right, like, Southern California, generally. But then, turns out, nope, it's Springwood, Ohio. So, you know, suspension of disbelief. So all of the boiler room scenes are shot in the Lincoln Heights jail. Nancy's house is a real home in West Hollywood. You guys can go drive by. In fact, a lot of the neighbors were upset, but then they got really curious when they saw England dressed up as Freddy and crowds began to form at night. Johnny Depp was as nervous as anybody, but for different reasons. As we mentioned, Lizzie, he had never acted before. Now, everybody said he was really polite and visibly terrified. He would sweat on camera. His hands would shake.

• 1:05:35Lizzie Bassett?

  He looks nervous.

• 1:05:36Chris Winterbauer?

  In fact, in the scene where Nancy and Glenn are hanging out with Tina and he's using the boombox to fool his mom, their laughter is real, because he was getting overwhelmed and flustered by the sound cues and working the boombox and the phone, and they were just cracking up.

• 1:05:49Lizzie Bassett?

  You can tell, and it works in the scene, but yeah.

• 1:05:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That scene works really well. It really feels natural. Now, Depp says that when he watched his first dailies, his performance literally made him want to vomit. That's how bad he thought he was. Now, equally nauseating was Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger mask, which took three hours to apply every day. It involved 11 separate elements, all glued to his face. At first, Englund was terrified that he was gonna hurt the mask by being too expressive. And then across the production, his skin is rubbed raw. And by the end, he wouldn't even wait for Miller to carefully remove it with solvents. He would just rip it off at the end of the day. But he channeled the pain into his performance. Here's the quote. Johnny and Heather were sitting there getting makeup on as if they needed it.

• 1:06:37Chris Winterbauer?

  These two beautiful young kids. And here I am, I'm getting basted with a turkey baster full of KY jelly. I envied them. I envied their youth. I envied their beauty. A light bulb went off. I could use this as Freddy. It was a shorthand for me to get angry. Which is great, cuz he's supposed to hate the kids in the movie. Yeah. Blakely has said for her part, "It was really hard to eat lunch around Englund with the mask." Johnny Depp did not seem to have that problem. He and Englund went out to a Thai restaurant and Englund just kept the mask on the whole time. One of the waiters caught sight of Englund, drops his tray of food and runs back into the kitchen. Yeah. Doesn't know what's going on.

• 1:07:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, we should mention, Amanda Wiss had it arguably the worst. This is Tina. She has arguably the least amount of screen time of the four teenagers. I guess debatable between her and Rod, but she gets run through the wringer. She's sealed in a body bag, which was terrifying, that is filled with blood. The snakes at her feet in the mud were real during that one dream sequence. The rubber centipede that actually comes out of her mouth is fake, but they did make a cast of her head where a live one crawls out and makes you have to blow air behind it to get it to crawl out. And then, of course, there's the scene where Doyle is rotating the room and she's flying around inside of it.

• 1:08:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Wes said that this felt really dangerous.

• 1:08:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, there's a lot of furniture in that room.

• 1:08:06Chris Winterbauer?

  It's all bolted down. By the way, J. Sue Garcia was strapped to the floor, which was in effect the ceiling. And Wes Craven and the cinematographer were locked into airplane chairs that were bolted to the set just behind him. And so that's how you get the camera, you know, looking over his shoulder as he's reaching up at a floating or stuck on the ceiling Amanda Wiss in that scene. Here's what she said. I was pretty scared going into that. I was afraid for my own physical safety because I kept thinking things were gonna follow me. I thought I was gonna fall out. And I believe she means she thought the furniture would fall on her. Now, Langenkamp, for her part, who was on set but was not in this scene, has said it's

• 1:08:50Chris Winterbauer?

  the only scene she's been a part of that was scarier in real life than on screen. The upside down set made Wes dizzy and nauseous. Before takes, Craven would pop his head up through the floor, AKA the ceiling, and help her reorient herself. And of course, that same bedroom set was used for Glenn's bedroom scenes.

• 1:09:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:09:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Where they shoot the blood out of the geyser, which was, as everybody I'm sure has put together, inspired by The Shining when the blood burst through the elevator. They poured out 220 gallons of water mixed with food coloring and poster paint in order to achieve that shot.

• 1:09:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very red. Now, thankfully, the most dangerous stunt was performed by a stunt performer. Freddie's burn, he is set on fire by Nancy, was executed by Anthony Sasser, who had performed a burn in Wes Craven's swamp thing. Fun fact, he's self-taught, Lizzie. He said he taught himself how to do controlled burns by dousing himself in different chemicals and setting himself on fire near his family's swimming pool.

• 1:09:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, we all gotta have a passion, you know? And sometimes that passion can become your career.

• 1:09:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Everybody on set was terrified. And they were just like, should we put this guy out? What do we do? What do we do? And he's like, I got it, guys. I've been doing this by my pool for years. It's not a problem. I would be doing this for fun, even if you weren't paying me.

• 1:10:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Even if you honestly don't pay me.

• 1:10:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, it wasn't just the stunt performers who were getting set on fire or getting heated. Sean Cunningham later said that Wes Craven was constantly calling him to tell him that they were out of time and out of money. Sean Cunningham was his director friend. In fact, Cunningham eventually offered to come in and shoot second unit pickup shots to help them catch up because even with 15, 16 hour days, they were not able to accomplish everything on their shot list. Lang and Camp cut her foot during one scene and needed stitches and Bob Shay said, "Do you really need to go to the hospital?" Not because he didn't want to get her medical attention, but because they didn't have a lot of time.

• 1:10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  A quick question, could we film the sleep clinic scene while you're in the hospital getting stitches?

• 1:10:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, this guy over here is setting himself on fire, so I'm just saying, maybe we take one for the team. Lang and Camp got the sense that the extra people that she started to notice on set were money people and that they were nervous that they weren't done yet. This was a little bit perhaps of subterfuge performed by Bob Shay because one of these people was producer Sarah Risher and she asked Shay how she could help and Bob said, "Pace back and forth, look at your watch and sigh."

• 1:11:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Chris Winterbauer?

  The crew was nervous, the cast was nervous, the producers were nervous. And to make matters worse, Lizzie, Bob Shay and Wes Craven cannot agree on how to end this movie. So let's talk about the ending. Wes Craven wants a happy ending. He wants Freddie to be banished, he wants Nancy to say bye to her mother after she's woken up, and he wants her to drive off to school with her friends. Bob Shay says, "No, it's a slasher. The killer has to come back one more time," as Jamie Kennedy says in Scream, "Careful, this is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life for one last scare. It's an essential beats." And he says Freddie should be driving the car.

• 1:11:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, you can't kill your franchise.

• 1:12:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the point. The compromise is the ending we get. Freddie isn't driving the car, but the car kind of is Freddie because it has his red and green stripes on the top of it. And then his arm pops through the porthole and yanks a dummy through that window so fast.

• 1:12:21Lizzie Bassett?

  The dummies in this movie are- So funny. The dummy of the mother after Freddy has like burned her is

• 1:12:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:12:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So funny. It is, it's like a decrepit mannequin they've ripped off of some, you know, Spirit Halloween store.

• 1:12:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks like they used like wire and then glued chicken bones to it and painted them black.

• 1:12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that scene so much because the mother like, you know.

• 1:12:49Chris Winterbauer?

  The mother's dead and the dad's just kind of like, you can tell he's thinking, this is going to make custody a lot easier.

• 1:12:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Watching the mother of his child disappear. He's like, well, you know, she was kind of a drunk and then he continues on. So funny thing though is even though Wes Craven wanted the happy ending, the jump scare of Freddy yanking mom through the porthole was apparently his idea. So I guess Craven just felt like Freddy driving the car was a bridge too far, but I'm willing to do the, you know, the porthole scare. I don't know. But the point is they did not come to this conclusion in advance, Lizzie.

• 1:13:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, that adds up because I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

• 1:13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  They filmed every possible version of the sending. They filmed every version of the sending.

• 1:13:35Lizzie Bassett?

  And I don't need it to make sense. I want to be clear. But if we're going with the logic of the movie, which does fall apart quite a bit towards the end when she's trying to bring him out of the dream.

• 1:13:45Chris Winterbauer?

  By the time the Glenn bed scene happens, I feel like we've kind of let go of whatever the original, you know what I mean, threat is.

• 1:13:52Lizzie Bassett?

  The Glenn bed scene still works for me because he's falling asleep. Um, but it's.

• 1:13:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, that, that part, it's when the blood starts going back out and his mom is witnessing that, that I'd start to lose. I don't know what's happening at that point because does Glenn have 220 gallons of blood in his body? You know what I mean? It's Freddy's just in our world at that point is my, is my point.

• 1:14:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:14:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I, I actually think the reason that it's important that Freddy be. Freddy reappear at the end of the film is that that's the only way I can understand the ending of the film, which is she has not woken up.

• 1:14:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Okay. So that's what I was wondering. That's what I assumed.

• 1:14:28Chris Winterbauer?

  That's my interpretation.

• 1:14:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that's what Bob Shay was going for.

• 1:14:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that she's still asleep. Yeah.

• 1:14:33Chris Winterbauer?

  She's still asleep. She's, she has not defeated him. She's still in this nightmare. It's inception. He's still dreaming, by the way. That's my take. That top is not falling over. So, post-production takes place over four or five weeks in New York. Editor Rick Shane reviews the footage with Bob Shay and Wes Craven, and Bob Shay goes, "Do you think there's a film there at all?"

• 1:14:55Chris Winterbauer?

  They argued endlessly, especially over the ending. They held a bunch of mini test screenings to gauge audience reactions, and they struggled about how much of Freddy to show on screen. Plus, the budget is still tight. Composer Charles Bernstein, who'd done Cujo the year prior, says, "Look, I'll just do the score at my house alone to save money." So they had to cut several seconds of blood splashing to maintain an R-rating. Craven hated this decision. He thought it was censorship. Bob Shay, meanwhile, is looking for ways to get creative on the backend and save his company. The problem is, if they do a theatrical release, they will take all of the risk of this movie not potentially recouping its budget. So Shay had gone to law school with a lawyer

• 1:15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  who had sold Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th to Paramount. This is Michael Lynn, who would later become the president of New Line. So Michael Lynn tells Shay, "You can do the same thing. Set up a screening at Paramount. Get them to buy your movie for $2 or $3 million upfront, which is nothing for them, but would guarantee you a $900,000 profit."

• 1:16:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So even after paying back your investors, New Line's in the black. The company continues to make movies. But if they distribute it themselves, there's no guarantee. If nobody shows up for this movie, they get 50% of nothing, and New Line ceases to exist. So Bob Shay says, "Let's set the screening up." They call Paramount. They get a screening set up for Frank Mancuso. He is the head of Paramount, the entire Paramount marketing department. This is it. This is the make or break moment. Will Bob Shay die in his sleep, or will he wake up from his nightmare? Screening's going well. Towards the end, the editor pulls Shay aside and goes, "We have the wrong ending."

• 1:16:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  They had accidentally loaded the final reel of the ending that had tested the worst.

• 1:16:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:16:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's 17 minutes left in the screening. And Bob Shay goes, get the fucking right one. The editor runs across the street, grabs the right reel, swaps it in, the right ending screams just in time.

• 1:17:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:17:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And Frank Mancuso says, we're gonna pass.

• 1:17:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Why? Well, Paramount had released Dreamscape shortly before this, which is a movie that pulled liberally from Nightmare on Elm Street. Remember, Wes Craven had sent this script to every studio before this, and Dreamscape bombed. And Mancuso says, I don't really think movies about dreams work. Dreams are dumb. I don't really put a lot of faith in them.

• 1:17:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I never had one and...

• 1:17:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm paraphrasing. He may be a lovely man, but I just like this idea that dreams are a little abstract. Let's be honest. He wishes Bob Shay luck, and Bob Shay is gonna need it. He showed the movie to his dad, and his dad goes, what's up with the ending? And they're in a bar together, apparently. And Shay's like, well, I had to compromise with Wes. And his dad's like, the ending sucks. You gotta change it. And Bob Shay, he goes, well, I can't. His dad goes, you gotta fuck up this movie. That's a real quote from Bob Shay.

• 1:18:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I love it. Wes Craven's mom didn't even watch it. She didn't watch any of his movies. She always said, Wesley, why can't you make a nice movie? Wesley couldn't.

• 1:18:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he really can't. He's tried, mom.

• 1:18:19Chris Winterbauer?

  He's tried. A week before the movie's gonna open, the film lab calls and they say, we are not giving you the negative until we get paid, because they had not been paid. And I could not figure out how, but Bob Shay pulls some business voodoo magic. Film lab releases the negative, and a Nightmare on Elm Street opens wide on November 16th, 1984. New Line Cinema gets a call, I'm guessing around noon, because John Waters had gone to the 10 a.m. showing on the opening day in Baltimore. And he called New Line and said, "You've got a hit."

• 1:18:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:18:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And John Waters was right. The reviews were mixed, but it didn't matter. In its first week, A Nightmare on Elm Street made $1.45 million. In its second week, it made just over $2 million. It ended its run at $25.8 million, 25 times its budget. And netting New Line Cinema, maybe over $10 million more than they would have made if they had sold it to Paramount.

• 1:19:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing. Wow.

• 1:19:30Chris Winterbauer?

  A franchise was born, and New Line Cinema became known as the house that Freddy built.

• 1:19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So thanks to Freddy Krueger, we have Lord of the Rings.

• 1:19:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. New Line Cinema became a mini-major. They produced the five sequels that followed, plus the underrated meta-entry, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which if you guys haven't seen, is really inventive.

• 1:19:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I thought you were gonna say Freddy versus Jason.

• 1:19:56Chris Winterbauer?

  No, that one's not so good. It's fun, but it's not so good. Wes Craven's New Nightmare takes place in the real world. Wes Craven plays himself. Heather Langenkamp plays herself.

• 1:20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:20:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they are making Nightmare on Elm Street, and Freddy enters that world. If you combine all nine Freddy-related movies, they grossed a total of $370 million. Now, the franchise hit some lows. Lizzie, you mentioned Freddy versus Jason. Not the best. Also, the 2010 remake with Earl Haley and Rooney Mara, I believe, is in that one. Also didn't quite work.

• 1:20:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe Kellin Lutz is in that.

• 1:20:29Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. I like Kellin Lutz. Craven had little to no involvement outside of the original, with the exception of New Nightmare, which he wrote, directed, and produced. And again, is a bit of it feels like almost a warm-up lap before a stream. Johnny Depp went on to stardom. We don't need to talk about that. He left Nightmare far, far behind and entered Tim Burton's world of dreams and nightmares instead.

• 1:20:49Lizzie Bassett?

  My question is how? And I think, I think I understand. I think The Stepping Stone was 21 Jump Street, but it's still just like, he's the, you know, I went into this being like, ooh, this is gonna be, you know, Johnny Depp's just gonna pop off the screen in a way that I'm gonna be like, that kid's a star. And instead I was like, wow.

• 1:21:09Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he really sits there. He really, he really sits there.

• 1:21:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Really just sort of sucks the life out of everybody on the scenes with him.

• 1:21:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He's got, to be fair, he has a great look. He just, you can tell, you can tell he's never acted. I mean, he's just, he-

• 1:21:21Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he has no idea what he's doing. And it's, I mean, it kind of works because he's just so disaffected.

• 1:21:27Chris Winterbauer?

  You can almost see him looking at Wes Craven off camera. You're like, you can almost see him like, was that it, Wes? Did I get it?

• 1:21:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Great when he's asleep.

• 1:21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I, I do love that he would go on to be Edward Scissorhands, which is the closest cinematic character to Freddy Krueger that we have, technically speaking.

• 1:21:42Lizzie Bassett?

  And I want to be clear. I think Johnny Depp is an extreme, is a great actor. So it's funny to see him start here.

• 1:21:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. The fact that he got good is amazing. It shows. It just takes practice.

• 1:21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing because he's not good here.

• 1:21:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, unlike Johnny Depp, who never returned to the franchise, Robert Englund found the role of a lifetime. He played Freddy in everything except the 2010 remake.

• 1:22:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that.

• 1:22:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Heather Langenkamp reprised her role as Nancy in the third sequel, and she played Heather playing Nancy in Wes Craven's New Nightmare. But her feelings toward the franchise are mixed at best. And I would like to play a clip about why that may have been.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  I have to say that I was more than a little jealous of Robert because, you know, Robert as Freddy was such a huge global icon very quickly after the second or the third movie. You know, kids were coming to my door in Freddy costumes. And I felt very much that the heroine Nancy was getting short shrift by the culture. Like, there wasn't a Nancy costume coming to my door. Not yet. And, and I- Worked really hard with Robert when we were together at these, you know, Comic Cons and Autograph shows that I kept trying to emphasize like, well, Nancy's important too. Like, let's give Nancy credit where it's due. And so that effort on my

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  part started maybe five years into it, 10 years into it. And now I really feel like the fruits of that, discussing Final Girls, getting the Final Girl, you know, talking about it with fans.

• 1:23:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, she's using the term Final Girl in that clip, so I do want to very quickly explain what that is for anybody who doesn't know. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. And it really just refers to literally the final girl standing. So it refers to the protagonist, the last one who is left at the very end of the movie, who is in a one-on-one battle with your villain. Famous examples would be Laurie Strode in Halloween, Ripley in Alien, Gail Weathers in Sidney Prescott in Scream, Jess Bradford in Black Christmas, and even arguably all the way back to Lila Crane in Psycho. It is interesting because, you know, on the one hand, I totally understand that like,

• 1:24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  in this world, of course, Freddie is going to be the most eye-catching, the most interesting, you know, the easiest to replicate in terms of costumes. But when you think about Final Girls and you think about like, people, you know, like iconic performances, and I, immediately, Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween comes to mind. I don't know. I think maybe they just gave her more to do. Maybe she's a bit more dynamic. I'm not entirely sure that that's a letdown of the Final Girl character. It seems to me like it's something to do with this movie in particular, that it doesn't spend a ton of time making Nancy all that interesting.

• 1:24:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I have, my theory is two-pronged, and I think it overlaps a little bit with what you're saying. Jamie Lee Curtis is the obvious one

• 1:24:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:24:50Chris Winterbauer?

  of an example where the Final Girl became as synonymous with the franchise as the villain.

• 1:24:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:24:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien would be the other example.

• 1:25:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:25:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And-

• 1:25:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, both of whom would also go on to be massive movie stars.

• 1:25:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. And they're candidly maybe a little bit about, like you mentioned, something about their presence or their acting ability. Let's be honest, Jamie Lee Curtis was more of a sex symbol than, you know, Langenkamp became at this moment in time. I wonder if it is in part because of how much personality Freddy has.

• 1:25:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Myers is a personality-less character.

• 1:25:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:25:31Chris Winterbauer?

  The xenomorph is a personality-less character. Part of what's terrifying is they are machine-like.

• 1:25:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Unless you're watching Alien Earth, then it's kind of cute.

• 1:25:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Right. Well, let's not get into that. Weird.

• 1:25:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I like it.

• 1:25:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Mess of a show. So I wonder if Freddy, by virtue of having such an expressive, weird, campy, fun personality, sucks more of the attention away from Langenkamp, whereas, again, Myers is so faceless, you are drawn to Curtis, you know, by extension. I don't think Curtis is given more to do than Langenkamp. I actually think Langenkamp is given more to do in Nightmare. She is, she is on the offensive more in the third act of this movie.

• 1:26:15Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. She's setting booby traps. She's got a plan. She, yeah, that's fair.

• 1:26:18Chris Winterbauer?

  More like a Ripley than Curtis in Halloween. And I think it maybe has more to do with the dynamic of the villain, respective to the final girl.

• 1:26:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Chris Winterbauer?

  That's just my theory. Let us know what you guys think. Now, Langenkamp said, "Doing Nightmare didn't really help my career." She said that people have a stuffy mentality about horror films, which I do think is true, especially women in horror films. And she said that "I kind of feel what a porno actress might feel, trying to tell everyone how great her movie was." Now, ironically, despite having actually worked in adult films, Wes Craven was freed, in a sense, by A Nightmare on Elm Street. He started adding comedy to his films. The People Under the Stairs, A Vampire in Brooklyn, Scream is very funny.

• 1:27:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:27:03Chris Winterbauer?

  He redefined the slasher genre. And Wes Craven finally made a nice movie in 1999, which, Lizzie, I'm sure you've seen, I saw it in theaters, Music of the Heart.

• 1:27:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:27:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Starring Meryl Streep.

• 1:27:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I have seen it.

• 1:27:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the first film of his that his mother ever saw.

• 1:27:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:27:22Chris Winterbauer?

  He passed away in 2015.

• 1:27:25Chris Winterbauer?

  New Line Cinema was acquired by the Turner Broadcasting System in 1994, which made Robert Shea more than $100 million in the process. But he always maintained his outsider perspective. He placed risky bets on movies that the rest of the town spurned, like Lord of the Rings. Go listen to our episode. I'd like to conclude this episode with a little thesis or thing or theory I've been thinking about. And Lizzie, we're both millennials, as has sometimes been begrudgingly noted by some of our Gen X listeners, but we appreciate you guys sticking with our limited viewpoint. And one thing I've always felt as a millennial is we are arguably the first generation, and I know this is not universal, but many of us were told, follow your dreams, follow

• 1:28:10Chris Winterbauer?

  your passions, right? In a way that prior generations had not been so privileged to experience. But as I've gotten older and as I think about what I want to tell my own kids in this increasingly complicated world, I've heard a different phrase, which is, don't follow your passion, follow your talent and follow your opportunities.

• 1:28:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's very good advice.

• 1:28:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and it's something I've struggled with a little bit on a personal level as someone who has been so fortunate to be allowed to follow his passion and be supported in following his passion, and yet candidly has had maybe more success unexpectedly podcasting than filmmaking at this point. I sometimes feel a little distressed at, do I go with my, well, and somebody will be like, you talentless hack, you don't have anything on podcasting. So I say it's all relative. I'm just saying it relatively more on one versus the other. But I think what I really appreciate about Craven and Anglin and Bob Shea is that these

• 1:29:13Chris Winterbauer?

  were three very talented, very talented individuals who all followed their talent and opportunity more than their passions. Bob Shea tied in a directing competition technically with Martin Scorsese, and yet the opportunity was in distribution, and that's the direction he went. Robert Anglin was a Shakespearean, classically trained theater actor, but the opportunity was this heightened campy horror role, and it became the role of a lifetime. Wes Craven desperately wanted to make dramas and comedies, by the way, which he did prove eventually he was very capable of. But the opportunity was in horror, and that's the direction he went.

• 1:29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And as a result, you know, they've all forged unexpectedly. But you know, their busts would be in the pantheon of horror, the hall of fame of horror.

• 1:30:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So to speak. So I will just leave it. It continues to make me think about how to approach your career and what the right way. We, we on this podcast tend to, I think glorify what could be a survivorship bias. Right. Which is they were on their last leg. It was their last audition. They were going to be done with Hollywood. And then all of a sudden, the big break came and you don't hear the stories of all the people who just had to quit because they didn't.

• 1:30:36Lizzie Bassett?

  And lost all their money. Yeah.

• 1:30:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:30:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm glad you said that. I'm a big, big believer in saying yes, in being open to opportunities coming your way that may not be exactly what you want or exactly what you're looking for. Because you do not know what doors those are going to open. You don't know where they're going to lead. And frankly, when you're 19, 20 years old, you don't really know what you like. At least that's been my experience. And I think that that is the best advice I could give is say yes, obviously unless it's, you know, dangerous or against your beliefs, and then feel free to say no. But in general, saying yes and being open to new opportunities is not going to hurt you. And it may in fact surprise you. Also, Chris is not a talentless hack. If you have not seen his movies, go give him a watch. They're very good.

• 1:31:23Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Lizzie, it's that time and I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:31:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I think the practical effects in this movie are fantastic.

• 1:31:32Chris Winterbauer?

  They're great.

• 1:31:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I just, they're, they feel very ahead of their time. They're very creative, you know. In looking at them now, I think you can see pretty easily how a lot of them are done. But that's okay. They feel very inventive. They feel organic to the format and they feel sort of groundbreaking for the time. I loved them. I just, I loved watching them.

• 1:31:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And they're fun, fun riffs on dream logic as well. Right. You can't run very fast. Your, you know, getting feet are getting sucked into the floor.

• 1:32:03Lizzie Bassett?

  His arms can extend his, yeah, he can push through walls. He can, you know, all this stuff. Yeah, I think it's really clever. I think it looks great. I think it's really fun to watch. I very much enjoyed this movie.

• 1:32:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I'm going to give it to Bob Shay. I don't know how you can, this is such a leap.

• 1:32:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Chris Winterbauer?

  That nobody else was willing to make and mortgaging a company's future. You know, and he was not, he was young, but he was not a young man in the sense that he had responsibilities. He had employees, he had children. I just, I find it impressive. I continue as I learn about him, he's, he impresses me and I learned more about his background in this one. And I think it takes, just again, a commitment to a vision that is not your own. I find, I find more impressive at times than a commitment to a vision that is your own.

• 1:33:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It's rare. That's the good executive and those are rare.

• 1:33:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's, you know, why I have so much respect for below the line folks as well, because they are also committing to a vision. And now they're also contributing to it. But anyway, so I'll give mine to Bob Shay. All right, Lizzie, should we tell the folks what we have coming next week?

• 1:33:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Absolutely. Next week, we have a movie that was an absolute disaster, I believe, behind the camera. And of course, just crystallized its own genre. It is The Blair Witch Project, AKA Take Your Dramamine Now, because that camera is shaky.

• 1:33:39Chris Winterbauer?

  AKA, is he possessed or peeing in the corner? Unclear. And it's terrifying either way.

• 1:33:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so fun. I can't wait.

• 1:33:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's really, it's great. And yes, as you mentioned, a originator of the found footage genre. And I'm very excited to learn more and the continued abuse of labor in the United States by those with capital.

• 1:34:01Lizzie Bassett?

  The true horror.

• 1:34:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. All right, guys, if you're enjoying this podcast, there are five easy ways to support us. Number one, just tell a family member or friend, just, you know, drag your nails down the chalkboard next to them and say, do you want to listen to something slightly more pleasant than that? Number two, leave us a rating and review on whatever pod catcher you are listening to us on. Five stars, five stars. Number three, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with dear listeners like you. You can join for free. You can join for $5 and vote on films we recover in the future. You can join for $5 and get an ad free RSS feed and bonus material, including reviews. We have got a fun one coming up on Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

• 1:34:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Jacob Elordi, the most beautiful Frankenstein yet, as we will find out. And you can sign up for $50 a month to get a shout out like one of the ones we'll do in just a second. But the new way to support this show is if you don't want to join Patreon because you don't like the platform or you don't want to switch platforms or whatever, you can actually now sign up for our special features subscription inside of Apple Podcasts where you will get access to all of our bonus episodes for $4.99 a month. We are releasing one bonus episode per month at a minimum. So if you go to our show page in Apple Podcasts, go to the top, you'll see an option to subscribe for $4.99 a month to our special features and that will give you access to, again, all of our bonus episodes, including we just did a review

• 1:35:30Chris Winterbauer?

  on Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. So if you're interested in that, sign up. All right, now for our $50 patrons, we do a fun shout out. So we're going to do some Freddie styled shout outs for you guys right now.

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

  Welcome to my nightmare, patrons. Let me describe to you something so terrifying you'll never wake up. Imagine a nightmare where you're holding a gun, but the gun never works because the gun's actually your penis. Maybe that's just me. All right, Adam Moffett, Adrian Pangkorea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Graceby, Chris Leal, come to Freddie, Chris Zaka, DB Smith, Dave Friskelanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schiavel, Ellen Singleton,

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  Ms. Zodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G. All right, it's time for a dream so terrifying you'll never wake up. Imagine your teeth are falling out one after another, tumbling to the floor, but you haven't brushed them in a long time. So the tooth fairy thinks it's disgusting and starts vomiting in front of you. And you're so embarrassed, you start vomiting too, and you're vomiting up teeth. And the whole thing's a metaphor for how you're in love with your mom. I'm talking about you, film it yourself, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Gray Hound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Master Marino,

• 1:37:06Speaker 04

  J.J. Rapidow, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Salto, Kay Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson. All right, it's time for the scariest dream of all. Imagine you've forgotten that today is the day of the big test, and now you're taking the test and you don't know how to answer a single question because it turns out the test is on you and all you have to do is think of one interesting thing to say about yourself and you realize that deep down you know there's not a single interesting thing about you. Wendy Olgesch, Lager McCoy, Landrelad, Lena, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath,

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Nate the Knife, Nathan Centeno, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott O'Shea, So Man Chai Nani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost Family, where the O's sound like O's.

• 1:38:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow, thank you Freddie. And just to be clear, those are not my dreams. Those are just weird things that Freddie came up with on the spot. All right.

• 1:38:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Thanks so much, Chris. That was a great episode. Really enjoyed it. And we will be back next week with The Blair Witch Project.

• 1:38:20Speaker 05

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.